Doctors can sometimes use a cancer cell's genetics to predict how it will act - how dangerous it is and thus what treatments should be used against it. Now a paper published in the journal Integrative Biology shows that a ...

More than 50 billion cells die in the human body every day, a spectacle of programmed cell death called apoptosis. These cells undergo internal degradation and then fracture into apoptotic bodies that are scavenged by immune ...

Most existing treatments for pathological bone loss inhibit osteoclasts (bone-destroying cells) to limit bone degradation. However, by doing this, they also prevent bone formation since it is stimulated by the presence of ...

When integrins let go of their ligands and the actin cytoskeleton inside the dendritic cell, the activity of another cell surface receptor, the GM-CSF receptor, rises. This increased signaling induces the dendritic cells ...

A surprise discovery that overturns decades of thinking about how the body fixes proteins that come unraveled greatly expands opportunities for therapies to prevent diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, which have ...

People with mutations in a gene called BSCL2 suffer from a rare medical condition known as lipodystrophy in which fat tissue is lost from where it is supposed to accumulate while being deposited at unusual sites around the ...

Researchers studying a type of cell found in the trillions in our brain have made an important discovery as to how it responds to brain injury and disease such as stroke. A University of Bristol team has identified proteins ...

(Medical Xpress)—Regulating the distribution of power in neurons is done by a system that makes the national electric grid look simple by comparison. Each neuron has several thousand mitochondria confined into narrow neuritic ...

Cancer is a complex disease, in which cells undergo a series of alterations, including changes in their architecture; an increase in their ability to divide, to survive and to invade new tissues or metastasis. A category ...

Cytoskeleton

The cytoskeleton (also CSK) is a cellular "scaffolding" or "skeleton" contained within a cell's cytoplasm and is made out of protein. The cytoskeleton is present in all cells; it was once thought to be unique to eukaryotes, but recent research has identified the prokaryotic cytoskeleton. It has structures such as flagella, cilia and lamellipodia and plays important roles in both intracellular transport (the movement of vesicles and organelles, for example) and cellular division. In 1903 Nikolai K Koltsov proposed that the shape of cells was determined by a network of tubules which he termed the cytoskeleton. The concept of a protein mosaic that dynamically coordinated cytoplasmic biochemistry was proposed by Rudolph Peters in 1929 while the term (cytosquelette, in French) was first introduced by French embryologist Paul Wintrebert in 1931.